Spectrogram of a recent large earthquake in Pakistan, recorded by
ocean-bottom seismometer RR09

Sismometer RR40 at sea, 20 nov 2013

Leaving Port Louis, Mauritius, Oct 23, 2013

Sismometer RR40 at sea, 20 nov 2013

OBS RR19 close to the Meteor, Oct 30, 2013

OBS RR21 On Meteor deck, Oct 31, 2013

OBS RR19 in view! Oct 30, 2013

Sismo of the french OBS RR40 at sea, 20 nov 2013

The French INSU OBS RR31 recovered, Nov 15, 2013

Mauritius lanscapes, Oct 23, 2013

French OBS RR40 in contact with the Meteor, 20 nov 2013

Night recovery of the OBS RR12, Oct 26, 2013

Recovering OBS RR19 at night, Oct 30, 2013

OBS RR21 at sea, Oct 31, 2013

OBS RR21 arriving on the Meteor, Oct 31, 2013

OBS RR22 pulled by the Meteor crane, Nov 1st, 2013

RR04 from below, nov 4, 2013

French OBS RR40 at sea, 20 nov 2013

RR04 from below, nov 4, 2013

Meteor in Port Louis, Mauritius, Oct 2013

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The volcano island of La Réunion is one of the strongest candidates worldwide for a hotspot underlain by a deep, "classical" mantle plume.

RHUM-RUM (Réunion Hotspot and Upper Mantle - Réunions Unterer Mantel) is a French-German passive seismic experiment designed to image an oceanic mantle plume – or lack of plume – from crust to core beneath La Réunion Island, and to understand these results in terms of material, heat flow and plume dynamics. La Réunion hotspot is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and its hotspot track leads unambiguously to the Deccan Traps of India, one of the largest flood basalt provinces on Earth, which erupted 65 Ma ago. The genesis and the origin at depth of the mantle upwelling and of the hotspot are still very controversial.

In the RHUM-RUM project, 57 German and French ocean-bottom seismometers (OBS) have been deployed in 2012 over an area of 2000 km x 2000 km2 centered on La Réunion Island, using the “Marion Dufresne” and they will be recovered in 2013 by the “Meteor” vessel. The one-year OBS deployment (Oct. 2012 – Oct. 2013) is augmented by terrestrial deployments in the Iles Eparses in the Mozambique Channel, in Madagascar, Seychelles, Mauritius, Rodrigues and La Réunion islands. A significant number of OBS will be also distributed along the Central and South West Indian Ridges to image the lower-mantle beneath the hotspot, but also to provide independent opportunity for the study of these slow to ultra-slow ridges and of possible plume-ridge interactions.